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Jules Lobel on Democracy Now on California Prisoners Hunger Strike

July, 2013Prisoners in California have entered their 10th day of a statewide hunger strike to fight back against what they call inhumane conditions. The prisoners’ demands include a call for adequate and nutritious food, an end to group punishment, and stopping long-term solitary confinement in high-security "special housing units" where more than 3,000 prisoners are held in the isolation units with no human contact and no windows — some of them for more than a decade.

Jules Lobel, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is the lead attorney representing Pelican Bay prisoners in a lawsuit challenging long-term solitary confinement in California prisons. "About 80,000 people in the United States are put into solitary," Lobel explains. "It’s an inhumane practice, but in California they go to an extreme by placing people without any windows, without any phone calls, trying to totally isolate them."